About Ciarán Murphy

Ciarán Murphy creates melancholic oil and watercolor paintings that he undergirds with a strong formal sensibility. The Dublin-based artist’s earlier work featured figurative forms, depicting somber animals and nature scenes, but he has since moved toward abstraction, portraying ambiguous spaces and ill-defined forms. Murphy’s images, derived from photographs, seem suspended in a dislocated space, lending them an archetypal familiarity. But the undetermined canvases never let viewers in too closely, rather distancing viewers with their seeming simplicity of technique, their cold, muted color palette, and washed-out quality.